The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) protocol is a protocol for input/output (I/O) communication via a PCI bus, which may, for example, be implemented on a motherboard of a computer. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any particular processor's native bus. The PCI protocol has evolved into the PCI Express (PCI-e) protocol, which provides benefits such as a higher throughput, reduced pin count, and better performance scaling in comparison to legacy PCI. Recently, PCI-e Generation 4 has been introduced, which can provide throughput of up to 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) per lane.